'The Women on the 6th Floor,' 3.5 stars

The French movie "The Women on the 6th Floor," like the British TV series "Upstairs, Downstairs," has drama, comedy, romance and class politics. It also introduces an element of ethnic prejudice.

The help in this charming and surprisingly deep import, set in 1960s Paris, are all Spanish, and their snooty masters and mistresses all French.

There's a sharp and funny early scene in which several ladies of leisure, over lunch, compare their Spanish maids, as if they were evaluating dog breeds. But not all the employers are so bigoted or clinical.

Wealthy stockbroker Jean-Louis (Fabrice Luchini) is introduced to the world of the Spanish domestics, who live on the sixth floor of his building, when he hires a beautiful new maid, Maria (Natalia Verbeke).

Soon he is going out of his way for Maria and her friends: fixing their stopped-up communal toilet; letting them use his phone for long-distance calls and helping them invest their money. Jean-Louis even moves into a vacant room on the sixth floor, after his wife, Suzanne (a brittle Sandrine Kiberlain), accuses him of an affair.

It's not with Maria, mind you. Although Jean-Louis has begun to have feelings for Maria, Suzanne is jealous of one of her husband's clients.

In any event, Jean-Louis' stirrings are as much the result of politics as passion. One of Maria's friends (Lola Duenas) is a hard-boiled communist, and the film is more about Jean-Louis' awakening radicalization than a servant-and-master relationship.

Luchini and Verbeke have a wonderful odd-couple chemistry. He's older and has a perpetual look of surprise on his face, as though he just sat on something sharp. It suits Jean-Louis' sweet sense of discovery. Verbeke has youth and intensity, but her earthiness and self-assurance ground Maria's beauty.

You wouldn't expect these two to play lovers, and in a sense, Maria and Jean-Louis aren't. They are more like catalysts who inspire each other to become the people they were meant to be.

In the end, "The Women on the 6th Floor" is about two individuals from different rungs of the social ladder who try to meet in the middle. But it's also, to a poignant and tantalizing degree, about how that gap can never be bridged.